Britain's Steve Jobs.
Sir Clive Sinclair has died
31–40 of 455 posts
Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died
#32I've still got my Sinclair in a shoebox upstairs, complete with the 16KB RAM expansion pack, a program or two on cassette tape, and the cord for plugging it into my TV (which would probably need a whole chain of adapters today).
Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died
#33The excellent Micro Men docudrama (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Men) has somehow been on Youtube since 2013:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM (1h24m)
Micro Men, working title Syntax Era, is a 2009 one-off BBC drama television programme set in the late 1970s and the early-mid 1980s, about the rise of the British home computer market. It focuses on the rivalry between Sir Clive Sinclair (played by Alexander Armstrong), who developed the ZX Spectrum, and Chris Curry (played by Martin Freeman), the man behind the BBC Micro.
(Sinclair didn't exactly like it though.)
Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died
#34My first computer was a ZX81, then an QL. I still have them at home. Maybe I'll try to power them up. I've found some listings of programs I wrote in BASIC on the ZX81. They are only marginally easier to understand than machine code, maybe not :-) but they were the first step to bring me here. Thanks Sir Sinclair.
I too still have the computer and it powers up. 90% of the keys have stopped working though.
Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died
#35ZX81 was my first computer, putting the kit (!) together with my dad. Didn’t work so sent it back and got a pre made one, found out later that at least 1/3rd of the kits didn’t work.
That, going through 101 Basic Computer Games, and typing in the esoteric Beagle Bros commands in their ads are fond memories.
Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died
#36RIP Sir Sinclair.
Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died
#37The Spectrum and ZX81 are (rightly) the computers for which Clive Sinclair is remembered. But it was his unsuccessful follow-up, the QL, which inspired a certain Linus Torvalds to write Linux:
Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died
#38RIP. Many a programming career, including mine, was started thanks to Sir Clive. There was a sense of wonder and awe around those machines that is no where to be found these days, even though we have so much power computational power. Something was lost.
Probably because back then you could rip apart your, say C64, and replace borked components with a soldering iron or so my dad told me.
Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died
#39I suspect a lot of people on this website wouldn't be here were it not for him (perhaps me included).
The sense of wonder I got as a kid by playing games and learning how to program on his machines made for amazing life-shaping experiences.
Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died
#40I've still got my Sinclair in a shoebox upstairs, complete with the 16KB RAM expansion pack, a program or two on cassette tape, and the cord for plugging it into my TV (which would probably need a whole chain of adapters today).
My 77" LG CX OLED still has a coax RF input, and I've hooked a few consoles and computers up to it. And it actually looks, well, better than I expected I guess!